Twitter’s Costolo: Promoted Tweets And The Importance Of ‘Resonance’

With Twitter’s big announcement of how it plans to make money with Promoted Tweets out of the way, the micro-blogging service’s COO Dick Costolo took the stage at the Ad Age Digital Conference to sell the idea. “We needed to launch a platform that went everywhere tweets worked, such as clients we don’t own like TweetDeck, Seesmic and HootSuite and others. The idea of “resonance” underlies the idea of Promoted Tweets, which Costolo explained seeks to insure whether these marketing messages are getting picked up or not. “The promise of Promoted Tweets is this: Brands and companies will not pay for Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate, and users will not see Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate.”

Aside from making sure that Promoted Tweets don’t just remain on the Twitter.com pages of its users, starting with search is also intended to give the company and its ad partners a better sense of how the platform is being used. Once Twitter believes it has a good sense of how the interplay between brands and Twitter users, the company will make Promoted Tweets available to outside syndicators.

So far, Virgin America, Bravo TV are the launch sponsors. For example, Virgin will use Promoted Tweets this week on flights — it allows wifi access on its planes — to connect with passengers in real-time, such as when they’re commenting on food and drinks in the air.

Costolo didn’t reveal everything there is to say about Promoted Tweets. He promises that the company will have more details on revenue sharing programs with publisher partners tomorrow at its Chirp developer conference.

Further down the road, location services will likely play a significant role in Promoted Tweets, Costolo said. It’s possible that an acquisition could be involved in bringing location services that can be marketed to smaller businesses, he added.

“There are lots of interesting ways to connect with marketers and at this point is as we move from a CPM model to an ROI model, we’ll be figuring out the meaning of the resonance score,” Costolo concluded. “And there’s a lot we don’t know right now. We’re starting the process of finding it out.”

Costolo sat down with CNBC after his presentation to further discuss Twitter’s ad model. Video is embedded below: